The Bhutanese Leading the way.
Changi Airports International of Singapore has been appointed to work alongside BIG on the development of plans for the International Airport in the Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC).
Changi Airport is one of the biggest in Asia and is the most awarded airport in the world winning the best airport award 8 times in a row.
Eugene Gan, the Chief Executive Officer of Changi Airports International attended the Bhutan Innovation Forum (BIF) and shared his thoughts on GMC and the International airport to be built there.
He said, “Six months ago, we had the honor of hosting His Majesty and his team in Changi Airport in Singapore, and even though it was only for a few hours, it was a very engaging and wide ranging discussion with His Majesty, whereby he laid out his vision for the GMC, and he also elaborated on his priorities and his strategies.”
“Well, I must say that our Changi Airport team was really blown away by that.”
He said they feel inspired to be part of this project as the key thing is that even though Bhutan’s current air traffic volume is considered relatively small, the GMC is actually potentially a game changer that would push the boundaries and would bring transformation to the aviation landscape here and possibly into a hub airport for this region over the longer term.
Eugene said for any airport to be successful as a hub airport, there needs to be two broad segments of traffic.
“In the airport jargon, we call it the core segment, which is the Origin Destination traffic, or in short, we call it the OD traffic, for passengers that is wanting to come into or out of the catchment area of the airport. And the second segment, which is equally important, is the transfer segment. As you can see, there are many examples around the world whereby countries or economies which are constrained by land and constrained by population size, use these two segments to broaden their market reach.”
He gave examples like Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore.
He said for the origin, destination for the OD segment, they do not see the hinterland for Gelephu Airport to be just the initial population size of 100,000 nor is it just the close to 800,000 population for Bhutan but actually GMC is at the doorstep of more than 5 million resident population across the border, which is, benefiting from the various Indian cities in both Assam state as well as in the West Bengal state.
“So I think this is actually seven times larger than Bhutan’s population, and this large catchment, can be well served by Gelephu, by the new Gelephu Airport, so long as we get our strategies, our infrastructure, as well as our policies correct.”
Eugene said the special differentiating factor of the GMC is that it is the first of this scale and probably the first in the world, and arguably also the only one in the world that has got the mindfulness culture and the value system that is so deeply ingrained and embraced by all levels of the society.
